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It was in 2014 that —
pregnant and in a prepartum panic — I raced to finish a draft that I
could present to my agent. When I sent it to her, she fired me; my
recollection of that conversation, which can’t be entirely accurate, is
that she said it wasn’t only not good enough, but that it was so far from
being good enough that she couldn’t help me fix it. The pregnancy
progressed. I got a new agent, a better and kinder one. She gave me notes
in early 2015; I made her estimate how long she thought it’d take me to
address them, and, under duress, she guessed six months.
Things that happened
within the following six months: I had a child; I kept the child alive.
Things that did not happen: everything else.
But soon enough, the
child was in daycare, and then, I did keep writing. I was freelancing,
and sometimes, between assignments, I wrote for a whole day straight:
four, five, six hours. Sometimes I didn’t. When you work on a novel for
as long as I did, there are entire years of this book’s life in which it
is dormant, ignored. I thought of it sometimes the way we think of
beloved old friends and relatives we need to call, half-longing,
half-resentful. But then, at least that meant I still thought of it as
alive. At least that meant I still loved it.
The question of what was
taking so long had a simple answer and a more complicated one. The simple
answer is that I didn’t have enough time. The more complicated one — in
retrospect, and in retrospect only — has to do with that life the novel
had, the love I had for it. On some level I wanted to keep spending time
with it, finding its unexplored corners, tunneling into its wormholes. I
didn’t want to let it go. It was mine. I realized this about myself late
in the book process, when I was sent post-editing page proofs to approve,
and I scribbled so much new material into the margins (new character
details, entire paragraphs moved from one chapter to the next) that my
editor was asked to hold an intervention.
When my copies of my
novel arrived in the mail, not long ago, I opened them with a sense of
dread that surprised me. I’d thought finishing the book — officially,
finally — would be a relief. But then, I’d never stopped writing the book
in my mind. I’d never stopped finding new problems that needed solving. I’d
only stopped having permission to solve them. In the end, I hadn’t
finished the novel so much as I’d just relented.
Years ago, when I was in
college, at Stanford — and starting to figure out that I wanted to be a
writer — some friends and I got to take a creative-writing class with the
writer Tobias Wolff, who had taught for years at Stanford and, before
that, at Syracuse (where George Saunders was his student). Toward the end
of the quarter, he did a kind of Q&A session, and I asked him what
differentiated the writers he’d worked with who had gone on to publish
books from those who hadn’t. His answer struck me, at the time, as
completely unsatisfying: the ones who published books, he said, were the
ones who just kept working on it, long after everyone else had given up.
Write, write, write. There’s not much magic to it, but, eventually, it
works.
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